“If you think about it. People with glasses are literally paying to use their eyes. Capitalism is a bitch.” Shortly after it was posted, it had accumulated 257,000 likes.

Tyler Cowen (2019). Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero, p 9

The economic doctrine of normal profit, vaguely apprehended by everyone, is a necessary condition for the justification of capitalism. The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

John Maynard Keynes (1923). A Tract on Monetary Reform.

Many policy prescriptions are themselves no more than metaphors. Both the centralizers and the privatizers frequently advocate over-simplified, idealized institutions – paradoxically, almost ‘institution-free’ institutions. An assertion that regulation is necessary tells us nothing about the way a central authority should be constituted, what authority it should have, how the limits on its authority should be maintained, how it will obtain information, or how its agents will be selected, motivated to do their work, and have their performances monitored and rewarded or sanctioned. An assertion that private property rights are necessary tells us nothing about how that bundle of rights is to be defined, how the various attributes of the goods involved will be measured, who will pay the costs of excluding non-owners from access, how conflicts over rights will be adjudicated…

Elinor Ostrom (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, p 22

In principle the economy pleased no one; in practice it satisfied most.

John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism (1956), p 85

While “thinking like an economist” is in principle a good thing, beware of people who claim to know how to do it. There’s really nothing magical or esoteric about it.

Noah Smith

What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.

Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (2009), p vii

But there is also this very, very basic fundamental insight of economics, which is that it’s possible for things to get better. It’s possible for people to cooperate, even if they’re not very nice people, and it’s possible for gains to be created. I think if you have that view baked very deep into the way you see the world, that changes the way you see things, and it’s very beneficial for your general outlook on life.

Tim Harford

The “moral” of any objective critical survey of the social policy problem is to be cautious or conservative to action. The possibility of acting intelligently is very limited; and any other action will probably have results more bad than good, if not disastrous.

Frank H. Knight. (1921). Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, p lxi